A High Water Mark for CBC News

When the Calgary Police came to the CBCbuilding on Westmount Boulevard around 7 pm on Thursday, June 20, and told usto get out, we couldn't exactly turn off the lights and go home to wait untilthe flood that was devastating much of the city and surrounding areas subsided.Hundreds of thousands of Albertans, and Canadians across the country wererelying on us for the latest information on this natural disaster.

It wasn't exactly a shock that we wereordered out, along with everyone else in large parts of the city. Rain had beenfalling for several days, and the Bow River was rising before our eyes. ByThursday afternoon, we were watching large mature trees, roots intact, floatingby. The water eventually broke the banks of the Bow, but it was the decision tocut power to our district that made the evacuation necessary.

Every CBC location has a plan for events ofthis nature, but as they say in the military, no plan survives first contactwith the enemy. We rely as much, if not more, on the knowhow, instincts andgoodwill of our staff. We immediately started moving our station vehicles,including our satellite and microwave TV trucks, out of the flood zone. One ofour communications staff called a counterpart at the Southern Alberta Instituteof Technology (SAIT), a five-minute drive away (but on much higher ground), andby 10 pm we'd arranged to take over three well-equipped computer labs as atemporary production facility. Less than six hours later, we'd transformed theminto a radio studio, a newsroom and a TV production area.

Our initial focus was getting the radiostudio set up for the morning show, which would begin at 5:30. Radio and ourwebsite were the best platforms to deliver survival information especiallysince widespread power outages left TV sets dark. Our CBC Calgarywebsite had more than four million page views between Thursday and Sunday, withover two million unique visitors. On days when the sun's shining in Calgary andthere's no flood, we get between 90 and 100 thousand page views.

^{June 22: Russell Bowers broadcastsDaybreak Alberta from a classroom}

TV presented its own challenges, but wemade it work. Locations like Calgary are used to shipping their video to thegiant computer servers at CBC headquarters in Toronto. This makes the contentavailable to all CBC services across the country, but under normalcircumstances, we would produce our own newscasts in Calgary. With no mobileproduction facility, we relied on CBC staff in Toronto and Vancouver to handlethe switching and production of our shows. Again, nothing fancy, but we made itwork. In fact, during the entire crisis, we produced hours of extra radio andtelevision programming, for our audiences in Alberta and across the country, Whilproviding content to CBC News Network's almost non-stop coverage for the first48 hours. By our accounting, we missed getting just one short radio newscast toair. Our temporary solution wasn't perfect, but we were able to identify someissues, especially related to our computer systems, that we hope to addressbefore something like this happens again.

None of this would have turned out so wellif it weren't for the contributions of the staff at SAIT, and our ownemployees. SAIT provided everything from IT and security to catering services,and those three computer labs were conveniently located right next to a parkingarea for all our vehicles. Our CBC employees were working overtime to keep localand national audiences up-to-date on radio, TV and online, while at the sametime dealing with their own personal challenges. Roughly one-third of them wereforced from their own homes by the flooding and power outages, so there was nowarm bed for them to return to once their shifts were over.

Speaking of which, times like thesesometimes make for strange media bedfellows. In the midst of the crisis, wewere approached by CITY TV in Calgary, offering their own facilities to us, andasking for permission to simulcast our TV newscast, as they no longer producenewscasts in Calgary. We took them up on the latter request. It's part of ourpublic service mandate to get information out to as many people on as manyplatforms as possible. And if we hadn't been given the green light to return toour own building on Sunday evening and fire up all our systems successfully, wemight very well have taken up temporary residence at CITY the following week.

As I've indicated, I'm proud of the way ourstaff responded to this crisis, and grateful to our partners, especially SAIT,for their support. Extreme weather events aren't exactly rare these days; infact, we lost power to the Broadcasting Centre in Toronto for 90 minutes duringthe flood on July 8. It happened right in the middle of our supper-hournewscast, but we'd made changes based on previous events and kept the show onthe air this time. We know that Canadians look to the CBC in times of crisis,and we're here to deliver.

For our staff in Calgary, this story isn'tover. Many of them are supporting the Calgary Foundation's Recovery andRebuilding Fund. Here's a short video they've produced to promote thatcampaign.